This invention relates generally to printing of character strings, and may be applied to printing of postage indicia by postage meters.
Conventional postage meters use conventional printing technology such as thermal printing or inkjet printing to print postage indicia on mailpieces or on labels to be applied to mailpieces. Typically, some portions of the indicia are “fixed”—i.e., do not vary from indicium to indicium printed by the same meter, whereas other portions of the indicia are “variable”—i.e., do vary from indicium to indicium printed by the same meter. An example of a variable portion of conventional postage indicia is the character string which indicates the amount of postage represented by the indicia.
In conventional postage meters, variable character strings are printed using “fixed spacing”, which is a manner of spacing the character string such that each character occupies exactly the same amount of space along the printed line. Fixed spacing was typically produced by conventional typewriters, but, in word processing equipment or software, proportional spacing is often employed, such that the amount of space occupied in the line of print may vary from character to character. For example, in proportional spacing, the letter “w” may occupy more space along the print line than the letter “i”.
FIG. 1 is an illustration of a conventional postage meter font used for printing with fixed spacing. It will be observed that each character, including the space character (“ ”) and the decimal point, is defined in a respective print cell, and that all of the print cells are the same size. FIG. 2 is an example of a postage-amount character string printed with the font shown in FIG. 1. As would be expected from the description of the font shown in FIG. 1, the decimal point and the space character each occupy the same amount of space in the character string shown in FIG. 2 as is occupied by each of the other characters.
In the interest of improving the appearance of the postage-amount string shown in FIG. 2, it may be desirable, or even required by postal authorities, to decrease the amount of space along the print line occupied by the decimal point and the space character, as would be done if proportional spacing were employed. However, conventional postage meter printing software cannot be converted to conventional proportional spacing fonts without significant and expensive software redesign.